Back to the 30s

**Please substitute the word "sick" or "disabled" for the word poor throughout the 1930s quotes. Welcome to 2010 and the humiliating, degrading world of ATOS, ESA & Work Programmes. Do play the soundtrack above as you read :)

"Then in 1930 the Depression {2008 Credit crunch} threw government into a fiscal panic, and the poor {sick} got the sharp end with the {Work Capability Assessment} Family Means Test. You had to prove just how poor {sick} you were, in intimate domestic detail. It imposed form-filling, impertinent questions......"

"It broke families into homelessness : adult children lost all benefits if anybody in the house earned 31 shillings a week, so they had to move out....."{Anyone claiming ESA with a working partner who earns just over £5000 per year will lose all benefits}

"From 1934, 190,000 unemployed men were made to attend “training camps” simply because there were no Jobs." {New regulations for Mandatory Work Activity have been laid before parliament (March 14th). The government have announced new powers for Jobcentre Plus advisers, that will allow them in certain circumstances to refer Jobseeker claimants to mandatory work placements. The DWP said, “where advisers believe a jobseeker will benefit from experiencing the habits and routines of working life, they will have the power to refer them to a four week mandatory placement.}

"The depression {credit crunch} originated in the U.S., starting with the {sub-prime housing crisis} fall in stock prices that began around September 4, 1929 and became worldwide news with the {fall of Lehman's} stock market crash of October 29, 1929 (known as Black Tuesday). From there, it quickly spread to almost every country in the world."

"An even larger question is whether the {Credit Crunch} Great Depression was primarily a failure on the part of free markets or, alternately, a failure of government efforts to regulate interest rates, curtail widespread bank failures, and control the money supply. "

"In an effort to balance the budget and restore confidence in the pound, on the {22nd June 2010, George Osborne} 10 September 1931 with Phillip Snowden still as Chancellor, the new national government issued an emergency budget, which immediately instituted a round of draconian cuts in public spending and wages. Public sector wages and unemployment pay were cut by 10%, and income tax was raised from 4s 6d to 5s in the pound^[6] (from 22.5% to 25%). The pay cuts did not go down well however and resulted in a Mutiny in the Royal Navy."

"Politically the decade {1930s} was dominated by a Conservative-led coalition while Labour tried but failed to be more than the party of the victims of the recession. The National Government blamed Labour for the mess in which the country had fallen - although the origins of the recession lay in Wall Street - while invoking a rhetoric which asked everybody to suffer some pain to see the country through."

My Working Life

I got my first job at 12. I worked as a chambermaid at a local holiday camp.

I managed two shifts, but I kept vomiting and was in too much pain to make the beds, so they didn't want me to come back.

Next, I put an advert in the local paper to offer my ironing services. A lovely lady employed me for three hours a week. She lived in the next village three miles away, so Mum and Dad bought me a shiny new bike to get there. I used to have to stop half way, doubled over in pain. Dad was really angry that I never wanted to use the £80 bicycle, so I stuck at it for 6 months.

At thirteen, I set up my own music school. For the next 5 years, I taught younger children to play the keyboards. In the end I had 20 students and we won every class of the county music festival. It was great! I earned £12 an hour and I was only 13!! Later, when I went to college, I supplemented this already-generous income by hauling three enormous keyboards to pubs and clubs and restaurants. I morphed into piano-bar-jazz-totty and loved every minute of it.

One New Year, I was booked for three nights to play the entire weekend at one of the most famous restaurant-hotels in the country. It was 150 miles away and Mum was going to drive me enjoying, a lavish weekend as reward.

The night before I was due to go, the crohn's-ghost of Xmas past flared up and I spent all night writhing in pain and vomiting every 20 minutes. It went on all night and all the next day until I was delirious. By lunch time, Mum was begging me to phone the doctor, but if he came and gave me whatever horse tranquilliser he usually did, there was no way I would be able to play, let alone sing.

We agreed that I would have the injection, then get straight in the car. As  it was three hours away, I argued that I could pass out all the way, and hopefully I would wake up feeling better before I was due to go on.

When we got there, I dragged myself back to consciousness, put on a fabulous red satin frock, an inch of make up to cover the pain and smiled and sang through the haze.

At uni, I worked all through as a barmaid. I had to, we were poor. It made me so ill I used to have to sit on the beer fridges to get through the shifts. The pain was always there, clouding everything, filling my eyes with unwanted and unexpected tears. Still, I flirted and traded banter, as barmaids must, and never even considered leaving early or not going to work.

You see, I didn't define myself as ill, even then. It took a very long time before these "episodes" became a life, before they wore me down and defeated me. I never had any support from college or uni, despite missing a third of both courses and I never expected any. I would make it through an academic year with grim determination, then collapse into a hospital bed for most of the summer holidays, only to discharge myself in time to go back.

After uni, I got the best job it's possible for a graduate to get. I was selling cable TV on the telephone just as it arrived in the UK. Everyone wanted it and we couldn't fill in the contracts fast enough. We were all young and ambitious and our success led to nights out drinking champagne and a shower of gifts and incentives from delighted media moguls.

By this time though, I was dangerously ill. I couldn't eat at all and faithfully took a thermos of liquid feed to work every day, sipping it miserably while everyone else went on bacon sandwich runs and made dinner plans. The pain was so terrible, I had to sit with my legs curled up under me on my office chair and move places to be as close to a vomit haven as I could be.

Finally, after three months of farcical, foodless "normality" I was rushed into hospital, where I stayed for 5 weeks, having my first major operation. When the surgeon came to see me after the op, he said I would have died if they'd left it for even one more hour. My bowel had started to perforate, I had a 12 inch abscess and the disease had eaten away my appendix entirely.

I'd only been working for 4 months before the op, but the day I walked back into the office (just two and a half weeks after surgery - no-one told me I shouldn't drive that soon) all my colleagues stood up and gave me a round of applause. My boss called me into her office and I shuffled in reluctantly with a heavy heart, sure she would have to fire me.

Astonishingly, she said I was so good at the job, that she would not only keep me on, but she would pay me for the whole time I was off, including an average commission.

Sadly, the company relocated to Manchester, and we all got made redundant a few months later.

And so began a ridiculous cycle of

Get a job
Work hard at job
Do well at job
Get too sick to do job
Get rushed into hospital
Lose job

I tried cutting out the commuting, but the day was still too long.

I tried a job working late shifts, hoping I could spend my customary 2 hours on the loo in the mornings and still do a day's work. The pain was still too terrible. I couldn't think through it or sometimes make myself walk the mile to the office every day.

I tried a job as a customer service assistant for a large pharmaeutical company. I was working in shipping and I loved it. My colleagues were fun and the work was interesting. The morning drive took me through the National Trust estates of Sussex - Arundel, Pulborough, Petworth and Cowdray Park. I'd see deer, resting in the morning mist and arrive at work feeling calm and happy, but the crohn's was always there.

The cafeteria was incredible and they used to cook me my very own soup every day from "safe" crohn's ingredients. My boss became a good friend, and would notice when the colour drained from my cheeks and I rushed off to vomit. When my eyes drooped and the overwhelming urge came to just sleep, she would suggest I get under the desk and take a nap! "No-one will know" she'd say, "I'll tell them you're in a meeting."

All the same, surgery caught up with me, and because I was only temping, I lost the job - and the income that went with it.

Finally, I retrained as a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer. I got a career development loan and passed all the exams. I thought that if I could earn more per hour, I could work less, but the only contracts were around London, so my day was just as long and 5 times more stressful.

By this stage, my friends and family had formed a direct action group. They all got together and decided enough was enough. Working was slowly killing me and the harder I tried, the sicker I got. They ambushed me with Incapacity Benefit forms, nagged me incessantly, refused to go away for weekends or take me on holiday. The made me face up to the fact that I was sick, whether I wanted to or not. I'd had four major operations, I weighed around 6 stone and I'd never had a remission.

Giving up on my dreams was the single hardest thing that chronic illness has ever made me face. I was destroyed, defeated. I'd battled to stay at uni, despite doctors telling me every year that I shouldn't, I'd battled to be a success, to have a career. Who was I now? Who would I be?

Sue was a grafter, a winner. How could she redefine herself as a failure? A loser?

It took me a long time.

Slowly though, I found other things. I supported the Labour Party more locally, taking on back office jobs that I could cope with. I helped people, took in friends who'd fallen on hard times because it gave me purpose.  I cooked for soup kitchens now and then and ran our household budget with such imagination, that somehow we survived on one wage.

I went all "Big Society"

But now, you see, that's not valued. I feel guilty for leaving my home wearing heels and make up. I am made to feel useless unless I "work". I must become a cog again in the huge machine of growth creation. Not in the third sector, but in the "market" sector.

So if you run a company and want to give me a job, I need a nice big desk with nap space beneath it. I need access to healthy food and my desk has to be nearest to the loos in case I'm sick or I pooh in my pants. I need totally and utterly flexible working hours - I might be off for weeks on end or need days off at least once a week for hospital appointments or procedures or meds.

I'll need a little "safe room" where I can inject myself - toilets aren't very sanitary for that kind of thing. I froth at the mouth a little from the meds I take, but we can probably ignore that. When my brain shuts down completely from pain and exhaustion, I'll need you to be very understanding when I send the wrong consignment to the wrong country or lose a weeks profits by forgetting to charge the customer.

Finally, you need to be OK with crying, (I know a lot of men in particular find this uncomfortable) You see, when I just can't take any more, my eyes have this annoying habit of filling with tears - my body's last weapon in the fight for rest.) When the pain and exhaustion and nausea all get too much, I'll need somewhere quiet to cry. Uncontrollably huge, wrenching, sobbing, gasping tears, where no-one can see me and I don't make customers feel uneasy. Once that's out of the way though, I usually feel much better, so onwards and upwards eh?

***************************************

Today sees the launch of a new campaign by The Broken of Britain. We will be using twitter and Facebook today, over the weekend and through next week to raise awareness of the changes to ESA. The deadline for public enquiry submissions is next Thurday 14th April. This is your chance to tell the government about your working life, why you claim ESA and how it will affect you if it is time limited to just one year or how the Work Capability Tests fail you. 

We'll be using the hashtags #fitforwork and #DWP45 on twitter, and would love to hear from as many of you as possible. Please reteweet them if you see any - we'd love to get these trending. 

You can find details here on how to make a submission to the enquiry. 

Please share this article on twitter and facebook, retweet, link and promote - we need as many people to make submissions as possible. 

**You will find my Facebook button is currently not working. Simply copy and paste the article link and paste it on Facebook, that should work fine. 

1930s Means Test

I've just gone all cold. Just google "1930s Means Test"

I cried a bit.

If you follow this blog, I think you'll feel much as I did. Hers's an example from an article in the Times, from 2008.

November 17, 2008

There is nothing mean about a means test

We should not let the petty cruelties and errors of the 1930s cloud our debate today about how to reform the welfare state

Libby Purves

Forget dinosaurs and Roman orgies. If a Time Machine were invented tomorrow, we should just whirl back 80 years and bang a lot of official heads together. Their errors haunt us still: in the realm of emotional politics Britain is still paying a heavy price for misjudgments and cruelties in the years between the wars. OK, the Establishment was in shock, grieving for the war dead and wobblingly insecure about the loss of Edwardian certainties and reliable valets. But that is no excuse. Get back there, roll up the sleeves, give them a shake.

The damage done in the 1930s rings down the decades. It prevents sensible husbanding of public resources, muzzles plain speaking and ruined the Labour Party with years of sentimental infighting. Seventy years on, two words are still sabotaging the social security system: Means Test. If those two words convey nothing, try them out on your granny and stand well back. If you have no 1930s working-class adults handy, here is a brief summary.

In 1918 postwar relief for unemployed ex-soldiers and civilians was a comparatively generous “non-contributory donation”. It seemed that the degrading days of the Poor Law were over, and the nation was at last properly respectful of its workers and former cannon fodder. But through the 1920s conditions of unemployment benefit got narrower. Then in 1930 the Depression threw government into a fiscal panic, and the poor got the sharp end with the Family Means Test.

TIMES ARCHIVE

• Jarrow marchers in London

• The plight of Jarrow

• Jarrow marchers: letter from the Bishop

You had to prove just how poor you were, in intimate domestic detail. It imposed form-filling, impertinent questions, and regular, shamingly visible, visits from investigators licensed to peer into your cooking-pots, rule that one chair per person was enough, and order you to sell your spare blankets. John Craig, an apprentice fitter, recalled: “You got so much off the labour exchange, but they kept control, and following you about would come to your house. Mother had a lovely big organ in the house. The inspector says ‘Well, you don't get any more money for four weeks until you sell that organ'. And my father belted him down the stairs.” It broke up families into homelessness: adult children lost all benefits if anybody in the house earned 31 shillings a week, so they had to move out.

From 1934, 190,000 unemployed men were made to attend “training camps” simply because there were no jobs. One contemporary interviewee asked: “How could anyone expect an unemployed man to do physical jerks on 15s a week, or play ping pong, while his wife was sitting at home before a half-empty grate with only margarine to eat?” This humiliation visited on a formerly proud working class by the means test led to the Jarrow March: which demanded, let me remind you, not handouts but work......

I hope MPs NEVER take a day off sick...

Dear Government,

SICK and Disabled. CHRONICALLY ILL. SICK, SICK, SICK, Long term variable, disabled, LONG TERM VARIABLE, disabled, SICK, CHRONICALLY ILL, SICK and Disabled. CHRONICALLY ILL. SICK, SICK, SICK, Long term variable, disabled, LONG TERM VARIABLE, disabled, SICK, CHRONICALLY ILL, SICK and Disabled. CHRONICALLY ILL. SICK, SICK, SICK, Long term variable, disabled, LONG TERM VARIABLE, disabled, SICK, CHRONICALLY ILL, SICK and Disabled. CHRONICALLY ILL. SICK, SICK, SICK, Long term variable, disabled, LONG TERM VARIABLE, disabled, SICK, CHRONICALLY ILL, SICK and Disabled. CHRONICALLY ILL. SICK, SICK, SICK, Long term variable, disabled, LONG TERM VARIABLE, disabled, SICK, CHRONICALLY ILL, SICK and Disabled. CHRONICALLY ILL. SICK, SICK, SICK, Long term variable, disabled, LONG TERM VARIABLE, disabled, SICK, CHRONICALLY ILL.

Did you know there are conditions other than cancer that last for more than a year? That make you unable to work? That crush lives and ruin families and destroy hopes and dreams, that end the life you thought you would have? That guarantee daily pain or horrible indignity? That chain you within four walls or take away your hobbies and friends?

As far as I can see, both the coalition AND Labour have absolutely no idea that there are any long term illnesses in the UK at all. According to them there might be a few people who have to use a wheelchair or are blind, but that's about it.

It seems clearer and clearer that our politicians are unaware of kidneys or hearts or bowels or lungs or blood or bones or minds.

Makes sense really. They clearly have no souls.

A Very British Revolution

We had our April CLP meeting last night.

I live in Blue-rinse-central, Toryville. Few Tory MPs enjoy a larger majority than mine. It has been said that you could pin a blue rosette on a sheep here, and people would still vote it into power.

We haven't had even one Labour councillor for over 40 years.

This decay and decline is like an unstoppable train. The Lib Dems have capitalised for years, never failing to put out a leaflet with the familiar words "Labour Can't Win Here." As Labour disappeared from view, fewer people voted for us and fewer members signed up. Fewer members meant fewer activists and the faithful 12 or 13 who turn up religiously every month are largely ageing and ailing. Fewer members also meant less money in the coffers, so rarely enough to pay for leaflets or events.

Elections come and go and we are encouraged to travel to the nearby marginals to canvass and campaign, weakening our ability to turn things around here even more.

In the end, our dedicated team of 12 or 13 couldn't even field enough candidates to cover every ward in local elections, leading residents to think that Labour barely existed here at all. They were right.

Despite all of this, around 9000 people leave their homes religiously every election to vote Labour.

But wait! Since the election, and in fact a few months before, people have started to join Labour here again. We've had nearly forty new members in our CLP alone and they're eager! We've started to hold regular discussion-only meetings to attract more members to come along and it's worked.

Emails have appeared offering to deliver leaflets - last night, a queue formed to give me offers of help in my ward. For the first time, we are able to put a leaflet through every door in several wards and we have a candidate standing in  every ward.

Our entire election leaflet is an appeal to those who previously voted "tactically" and only ever ended up with their own version of a Tory/Lib coalition. Our town is supposedly affluent, yet public buildings are abandoned and crumbling, new facilities are never built and our town centre is in decay. Families are always pushed aside in favour of pensioner friendly policies.

We will almost certainly remain unrepresented on the local council - we have a lot of decline to reverse - but if 300 or so people from each ward switch from Lib Dem to Labour, the entire tactical voting facade comes crumbling down. It's starters for ten and level-pegging. Just 300.

And if that can happen in a Sussex constituency represented by the Right Hon Mr Sheep, MP, then it can happen anywhere. Up and down the Shires and the Downs and the Cotswolds, it only takes a few hundred voters to switch, and the terminal southern decline Labour saw at the general election could take a first step towards resuscitation.

If, like me, you're standing for council, just keep focussing on those 300. Knock on their doors, tell them what you want to achieve and why now, more than ever, you want the chance to represent them. I have a feeling that for the first time in a very long time, they might listen.

How much tax is paid by the Workers and how much by Business?

There has been much talk lately of a fairer tax system.

Thanks to organisations like UK Uncut and 38 Degrees and those behind the Robin Hood Tax, tax avoidance and tax evasion are now high up the agenda and offer a real "alternative" to cuts and austerity.

How much of an alternative though, that's the question? Is there enough inequality in the system to carry out an economic "re-balancing" of an entirely different kind? Not one from public sector to private sector but from Business to worker?

We hear endless tales of woe from business. They are the wealth creators, the drivers of our economy. They are over taxed and over regulated, all of which, they claim, leads to inefficiency and a drag on wealth creation.

Osborne's plan is to cut red tape, give tax breaks to business and encourage businesses to invest, to employ and to grow. But will they? Without influence from legislation, will business leap to our rescue?

This astonishing chart compiled by my good friend Eoin Clarke over on The Green Benches seems to give the starkest evidence of why this approach is flawed.

Whilst workers account for 45% of all tax that comes into the treasury (through Income Tax and National Insurance), Corporation tax accounts for just 8%

Put another way, workers pay nearly 6 times more than business towards the economic effectiveness or our country.

Business sits on a £600 Billion surplus already - is there any evidence that leaving even more money under their control will lead to growth and investment? If the wealthiest business owners and so called "wealth creators" increased their personal wealth by 300% during the credit crunch, are we really going to stand by and watch it increase further while families are plunged into debt simply to pay for food and rent?

If anything illustrates how things have gone wrong and why they need to change, then surely this chart does just that?

Durrr!

Lord Owen: NHS changes must halt

Independent, Monday 4th April 2011

"Andrew Lansley should be prevented from implementing any further changes to the NHS while the Health and Social Care Bill is being debated, Lord Owen has said......."

Just thought I'd post that really. 

It seemed so blindingly obvious, I was amazed to even read it in print.